Neal Stephenson kickstarts the ultimate sword fighting game

Neal Stephenson, historical fiction and sci-fi writer, wants to take you into a world where you can prove your mettle as a swordsman in the arena through an interactive video game. Unfortunately, he needs your money in order to create his vision–and what better way to do so than Kickstarter.

His appropriately named design studio “Clang” is trying to raise $500,000 in order to create a motion-controlled battle environment. Why motion control? Well, Stephenson believes keyboards and traditional controllers sporting triggers are better left for the shooters. Certain, recently developed third-party technologies (i.e. the Razer Hydra) allows more interactive and intuitive gameplay to be possible. In his own words, he wants to “enable players to inhabit the mind, body, and world of a real swordfighter.”

His passion for creating a proper sword fighting game certainly shows in his added video, which goes into the details of combat and its importance in gaming. He mocks how many ways you can customize a gun, and how passionately users get into the stats and geeking-out that can come with it. But when it comes to swords the amount of customization and detail, he feels, is sorely lacking.

Stephenson’s promises sound reasonable: he wants to create an arena fighting based game–no story, no open world. Think Infinity Blade, but for PC only (for now at least). His idea is to start with a two-handed longsword and one-on-one multiplayer dueling. Stephenson calls this version only the first prototype and setpiece of a larger game he has planned for years down the line. Provided this playable portion of his game receives funding, the Clang team is expected to finish up phase one and deliver it to all who invested by February 2013. After which time Stephnson says he’ll revisist Kickstarter again for phase two, which is comprised of more character models, environments, and MASEs (Martial Arts System Embodiments).

If you would like to fund the game, and get a downloadable copy as well, you only need donate $25.